A 40 Year Sponsorship and the Practical Application of the 12 Steps – Sandy B.

I'd like to thank Polly again, that was truly wonderful. Polly is speaking again tomorrow morning, the meeting starts at half past ten. She's speaking on emotional sobriety, and that'll last about an hour and a half. Could I ask you if you get here as early as you can, because I believe some of the helpers in the kitchen didn't get to the meeting because people were coming late. But what I'd like to say to the speaker today, and I want you to give a nice warm welcome to this man, is from Tampa, Florida, Sandy Beach. Well, thank you very much. Hi, everybody. My name's Sandy Beach, and I'm an alcoholic. Boy, is it nice to be here. Um, I can't thank you enough for inviting us over. It's my buddy Steve and I came over on Tuesday and we've had the best time and we've decided this has to be one of the friendliest countries in the world. And so I just, I just love it. It's amazing. Let's see, my sobriety date is December 7th, 1964. And tomorrow is my sponsor's 42nd anniversary. So that means that he's still alive and I'm still alive so I've had the same sponsor for over 40 years, and that is a gift. And I'm going to get him a copy of this tape, so I want to say happy anniversary, Bill. And so I got that out of the way. And let's see. I get the statistics out of their way, and then people always ask me afterwards, so I just get all this stuff done up front. I'm 74 years old, I have six children, 15 grandchildren, and I have two children in AA, two daughters, and they're going to join me at a conference in Pennsylvania in two weeks. And that'll be exciting because you can imagine what it feels like. there was a time when my kids weren't speaking to me and now they ask me for advice and that is amazing and they refer to me as their hero and all this kind of stuff and this is all because of the transformation that takes place as the direct result of these 12 steps when they're applied to our individual lives nobody can give it to us We have to let it in, and I've been a lucky guy. My home group is the Saturday Night Fever Group in Tampa, Florida. And if you're ever down there, we have two speakers on Saturday night at 7 o'clock. We generally get a couple hundred people. We have punch and cookies and a raffle and all the A literature, and then we all go out to dinner afterwards. So we turned it into a real fun Saturday night. And I really believe that it has to be fun. I really believed that the joy of living means the joy of living. And I've been very lucky to be around what I call happy, positive AA since the day I get in here. And so that's the only brand I know. Holly, you said something. I'm just deviating, but I just want to get it before I forget it. that's saying that you have to deal the cards, or you have play the cards that life dealt you. Well, I want to give you a different spin on that. And that is, I believe that if you work the 12 steps of this program, God's will for us is to be happy, joyous, and free. And I really believe at that moment when you establish that contact that you are given that hand. It's as if you get an envelope and I hand it to you and I say, these are the cards that you have to play from now on. And you open them up and there's five cards and they're all hearts and it says, be happy, joyous, and free. so when you come around sad I go what are you doing you don't have a sad card you have to play the cards that were given to you you mean I have to be joyful yes you have to be happy you have to be and you know there's some power in realizing that those are the real spiritual cards that are dealt when we work these 12 steps. And they're designed to enable us to play those kind of cards no matter what's going on. And that may sound crazy, but I really believe that even when a sad event is happening, there could be an underlying joy of realizing that we're handling it in a sober fashion and that our higher power is never that far away that we can't sense the fundamental well-being of our lives. And so maybe we ought to get some of those cards made and hand them out. And then when we're all angry about something, wait a minute, sorry, you don't have an angry card. Where's that? That's not in there. You have to play. You said you'd play the cards that were dealt to you. Well, here they are. So, anyway, I'm going to tell you a little bit about me and then a little bit about why I love the program so much. I grew up in the 30s in New Haven, Connecticut. I have one sister, and my sister has 28 years in AA. And my parents were brought up or had us right around the time of the Depression. and so they were, you know, very wonderful people but it was a struggling time in the United States in the late 20s and the early 30s but they really did their best. My father's English, my mother's Irish and she made him convert to Catholicism and so we were all marched down to the Catholic church and my sister and I sat in the same pew. she saw the happiest, loving, warmest place in the world. I saw a Nazi concentration camp. That's what I saw. She thought the nuns were cute. Aren't they funny? Oh, they're so happy. I thought they were mean and they scared me to death and whatever I read scared me. me to death. I was just, it was just terrifying to be in that church. And she's whistling and happy. So you can see it's all perception. It's how we happen to see it. And somewhere around nine years old, I had studied the catechism. I knew everything. And the more I knew, the more it scared me. And I was sitting in the front pew one morning and I was staring at the crucifix, and it was a big crucifax. It must have been 20 feet, wooden cross hanging there. And it was as if the crucufix spoke to me, and it said, little boy, do you see this? No, yes. Well, this is what God did to his only son that he loved. Guess what he's going to do to you? and I fainted that was an awful lot to come down on you it was a serious insight people said what happened I had some bad food I couldn't tell anybody but I knew what was really going to happen so I was not very comfortable with the idea of a higher power or the church or anything like that. The other thing was, there's only four of us in my family. And we're at the dinner table, my mother, my father, my sister, and myself. And I saw the three of them as a unit. And then there was me. And I didn't know what I was doing there. It was like I didn'T even belong in that family. I don't know where that came from, but I always felt that way. Like, what am I doing here? I could see that you belong here, but I never felt like I belonged. I felt like there was something missing or something wrong. And that stayed with me for, it's just starting to go away. I mean, that's, I don' t know what that is. But it's kind of a funny thing to have. I heard a speaker one time, and he said he knew that someday he was going to be standing out in the meadows and a spaceship was goingto come down. And these little men were goingto go, and they're going to go, Ralph, Ralph, come here. You're not supposed to be on this planet. Get in the spaceship. We're goingto take you over where you belong. And he said, I knew it. I knew I wasn't supposed to. here. Who knows what that is, but a lot of us have that sense of not fitting in, and that contributes, I think, to becoming an alcoholic, so that was a little factor. I was a good student. I was a great athlete. I pretty much was not a troublemaker, maybe be a practical joker, but not a troublemaker, you know, not stealing or fighting or any of that. And so I did very good in school, and so my father put me into a little prep school in New Haven, and this school had about 40 guys in it, very small but very old. It was founded in 1660, and that school was a pipeline right into Yale University or Harvard or Dartmouth, any of the Ivy League schools. And I loved that little school. Very comfortable because it was so small. Everybody was important. You know what I mean? You could be the captain of something because they didn't have enough guys to go around. So, you know, it was easy to feel like you were part of something. But boy, I'll tell you, in 1949 when I walked down to the big university and I saw all these guys coming in from around the country with all that money and all that know-how, I was overpowered. I just felt so inadequate, it was so painful just to show up. I had the feeling during the freshman year, especially the first month or two, that the Dean of Freshmen was going to call all 1,000 freshmen out onto the old campus and he was going to say, gentlemen, we have an imposter in our midst. And he's right over there and he's going to point at me and they were going to get rid of me because it was clear that I didn't belong there. And my roommates are telling me, you know, you ought to be drinking, you're in the university. No, I'm not going to drink. I want to get high grades. I'm going to go out for the track team. I want to try these things. Drinking is wonderful. It'll make you feel great. No, no, I'm not going to do that. And I think there was something in the Catholic Church about getting 250,000 years off in purgatory if you didn't drink until you were 21. That may have played a factor. But I wasn't drinking. 19 years old. And I'd been in the university about a month and a half And I tell this story, every time I tell my story, my name appeared on a typewritten list of 30 guys and we were to meet in a room in this freshman area, maybe half as big as this room, and we would get to know each other. You know what I mean? Seven o'clock at night, go in. Just tell the guys about yourself and learn about them. Well, that was impossible. There was no way I could do that. And I remember going there and I said, this is too much pressure. But something inside of me said, give it a try. And I said alright, I will. So I came a little bit late and they had already broken up. You know how when people arrive in a room there would be four over here and six over here and seven and all that. And I came in so I looked around to see if there was a friendly group Well, there wasn't. And as I started looking around, people were looking back at me, and with their eyes they were saying, we do not want to know you. Don't come near our group. It was just clear as a bell, just coming right from their eyes, just me. But I said, I'm going to go over there. And the closer I got to the group, all five guys turned and they really put it on with their eyes. Don't come near this group. Don't you come in this group? And I just went over to this group and everybody did that. It was just so powerful. I never met anyone. And there was a bar there because they were too mean. There was just that hostility in their eyes." So I went up to the bar, and I said, well, maybe I'll feel good, because this is terrible. So I ordered a drink, whiskey and something. I drank it down. I didn't feel anything. Well, maybe you need two. So I had the second one. I didn' t feel anything, so I said I'll give it one more try. I'll have a third one, but it's obvious. Maybe this stuff doesn't work like my roommates are talking about. I don't feel great, and then I got halfway through the drink. I think I had decided it wasn't going to work and I put it down, turned around to leave I looked out and it was as if those 30 mean guys were gone and they'd been replaced by 30 of the friendliest people I have ever seen everyone in that room wanted to know me they were looking at me with eyes going would you join our group? We would love you to join our group. And I looked around and went, oh my God. I've never felt this welcome anywhere. This is amazing. Alcohol didn't change me. It changed the world that I lived in. And this was more like it. I remember saying, boy, I should have started drinking in grammar school. This is... And it was just wonderful. and I remember as I started walking over, I found myself agreeing with them. They would be lucky to know me. You know what I mean? And all of a sudden, the fear and the anxiety is gone so my creativity is free to be me. I can finally say anything I want and I'm like, oh, I've got something to say about everything. And I intuitively knew how to handle situations that used to baffle me. I was talking to all these people. It was wonderful. It didn't matter what, you know, Wisconsin, oh, the Badgers, New England. I mean, I had something to say about everything. Normally, all I knew how to say was, nice day, isn't it? You know, and that would be, yeah, yeah. Getting late, yeah? Okay, bye. Now I'm just talking, talking, and boy, pretty soon they're all gone. But the bartender's still there, and I'm going, boy, I feel great. I'm under three drinks. I wonder what 20 drinks will do, you know? So I'm standing there talking to the bartend until he finally packs everything up and leaves. So I probably, I don't know, 15, 20 drinks, you know, the insanity of the first time you drink. And of course, you knows what happens. A few hours later, the room is spinning around. I'm lying on the floor. I'm sick. I'm in the bathroom. I'm In the bedroom. I'm in the bathroom, and I think I spent the night on the cold aisle next to the toilet, which is a good thing to know for future reference. That's the place to sleep when you're that sick. And it was a deadly evening, andI got up the next morning and made it to my bed, and I sat on the edge of the bed, felt like somebody put a hatchet in my head, which is awful, and my stomach, and you know how I don't have to describe it. It's just awful. and the thought occurred to me, are you going to drink again tonight? Took one second, half a second. Of course I am. This sickness and this almost dying is a small price to pay for what I had last night. That was my decision. And I think if somebody had come up, that's how much alcohol impressed me. I think If somebody had came up and said, Wait a minute. We have to give you the official warning before you drink anymore. Would you be willing to give up your high grades for alcohol? Yes. Yep, I'd be glad to do that. Okay. Now wait a minute, before you go any further, would you give up all athletics? Yes. Yeah, I'll be glad if you give that up. What about getting in fights, your teeth knocked out and you're going to jail? That'll be fine. That'll by fine. What about your family? I'll never speak to you again. Fine, fine, fine. Well, would you give up your very soul? Yes, I'll give it up. I never use it. So I think I would have taken and said yes to all those questions had there been a warning. There's an old joke about, should there be warning labels on alcohol bottles? Did you ever hear that? And my answer is yes. There should be warning levels on alcohol. There should there should be a warning label on alcohol bottles and this is what it should say. Warning, this bottle may run out. You should consider buying two. Now there's a warning label that would do some good. Anyway, all those things came true. I almost plunked out of the university, no more athletics, getting in fights, going to jail, but boy was I having fun. I had a new primary purpose and that was to stay sober as seldom as possible. And And, geez, it was amazing. I just could hardly wait for the day to get through so I could start drinking again. I did graduate. The Korean War was going on. The draft. Everybody had to join the military. Some guys were drinking beer and they said, let's join the Marines. Yeah! So I signed my name. And that recruiting sergeant, he looked at us. He said, boy, I've got six suckers here today. and we're all, yeah, yeah ,yeah, and obviously when I arrived in boot camp it was a rude awakening. It was like whoa hey guys relax you're too intense here you know and and then boom you know anybody's been through the military training it was uh wow but after a while i kind of liked it you know what i mean there was all this camaraderie and the marine Corps is great at brainwashing you into thinking that this is the greatest thing in the world, back in history and all of that kind of stuff. And so I kind of liked it. Then we went for six months to become platoon leaders, infantry training. At the end of the six months, we're getting going to start getting our orders, and I saw a training movie about pilots. And they were at the bar in this movie the beginning of the movie and that caught my eye and they were talking with their hands you know like this and there was blonde women standing in the background and then they show these planes and they're landing on carriers and I so I went up to this major what's the flying thing there and he said oh you don't want that you have to sign up for three more years I'll sign up. I'll find out I mean you can see I had no plans for anything I'll signed up I had never been in a plane in my life never well I passed the test and I'm accepted to flight school Pensacola Florida I've met this wonderful woman while I was starting out in the Marine Corps and during the break we got married in Connecticut and we get on a plane after our honeymoon in New York down to Pensacola, Florida. And I get air sick on the plane. Oh boy. The old DC-3 and then I'm air sick in the old SNJ flying. My first five flights, I come back, have to clean the plane and my instructor's going, I don't think this is going to work. I just don't. But the motion sickness went away and suddenly I'm like number two, number three in the class. It was like I was born to do this and I just loved it. And it took 18 months of training and now I got these wings and I'm in the Marine Corps fighter jet squadron. And I'm overseas in Japan and the war's over. So all we do is drink and fly these high performance planes. And so I'm in heaven. And I got in this unit, and back then, the military doesn't drink like they used to. It's a shame. But boy, back then you drank as a unit. It was just amazing. The colonel would set up a table, and you all showed up at the same time. You didn't order a drink. They ordered rounds of drinks. You know what I mean? There'd be 20 guys in this, bring my troops a round of drinks. And I could barely keep up. They were all drinking, you know, at this pace. And I just said, this is heaven. I'm in with all these other guys that drink going crazy and we fly all day long and then party all night long. And it was just, I just thought it was heaven. And, uh, I'd been there about nine months. We're getting ready to go aboard the carrier and you practice on the end of the run, on the real runway to go overboard the carrier. And we were out, this major and I were at the end of the runway watching some of our buddies practice, and we were critiquing them. Oh, he's too low. You know, just talking back and forth. And he turns to me. This is one of my heroes in the squadron. He had been a World War II guy, and I just thought he was wonderful. And, he said to me, Sandy, in about a year, I'll be a lieutenant colonel, and, I'm going to get my own fighter squadron and it's going to be the greatest squadron, and I'm going to get nothing but the best pilots in that squadron. And then he pointed to me, and he said, and I want you in that Squadron. Well, I'm a young lieutenant, and I was just going, oh. I mean, you couldn't get a bigger compliment. And then He said, but I wouldn't let you drink. And I was astounded. We all drank the same. Why would He say that? And it wasn't until I got in AA that I realized, even in a crowd of big drinkers, my drinking scared them. You know what I mean? Alcoholics drink a little differently than the rest of the people. There's an intensity. There's a hmm-hmm-hmm, you know what i mean? And these guys, whoa, this guy, you You know, we drink a lot, but that guy. So it scared him. And that was my first clue that I could be different than anybody. I just thought it was wonderful, all this drinking. Well, my wife and I had six children in eight years. I got transferred as a forward air controller. Then I was a flight instructor. And then I was an autopilot during the Cuban Missile Crisis. and I got promoted to first lieutenant and I was promoted to captain and if you were to look at it you'd go look at this guy Ivy League graduate six children responsible father getting promoted but all I was was an alcoholic that was about to be taken right down you know what I mean the disease was now coming in where it would control everything and we didn't drink for 10 hours prior to flying. When I got in the advanced stages of alcoholism, I'm now in withdrawal and that is not a good thing to be while you're flying. To go into alcoholic withdrawal behind the controls of a high-performance airplane because bad things happen and I could see it. And after about a year of that, I started getting a little nervous about flying with me. You know what I mean? It was like, I wish I could go up with Harry. You know What I mean. I don't want to go up with me, but where was I going to go? I mean, I had to keep going. You can't quit. You can do it. So I'd sit in these planes and it was just like, oh. and I was flying, one time I knew it was going to pass out I just knew it I was sweating when you get withdrawals I would lose vision I couldn't see the instrument panel and I'm trying to fly a mission and I knew it was gonna pass out and the jobs that alcoholics have the people that prepare you for the job never imagine that there's going to be a surgeon who is operating during a blackout. So they don't train you in medical school for that, you know what I'm talking about? And so there was nothing in the handbook of this plane about how to fly during alcoholic withdrawals. So you have to make it up, you know, you know why I'm saying? So I'm going, what do you do flying a plane when you know you're going to pass out and you're covered with sweat. So I said, I'm going to fly the mission, the photo plane, everything's on the stick so you can take pictures, you can do everything. And then I put the other hand on the ejection seat. This is me solving a problem, okay? You ready? And I get a death grip on the curtain and my thinking is if I pass out, I'll fall forward, boom! The seat goes, the plane crashes, the chute opens automatically at 10,000 feet, and I'm okay. And part of me thought that was normal. You know what I mean? I said, boy, they almost had me, but the old fox, he figured his way out of this one. You know, whoa! So that's the kind of alcoholic problem-solving that we do. Well, it got so bad after about six more months that I went to the doctor, which I only do as a last resort, but this was getting really bad, and I told them about it, and they agreed that this is a terrible situation. The planes then cost $2 million or something like that. Now they're $30 or $50 million, but we can't have you up in those planes. We've got to find out what's wrong with you. So we're going to send you down to a bunch of expert Navy doctors for two weeks. Now, back in the early 60s, there was no disease of alcoholism and there was not alcohol treatment. So you had to have something else. You follow what I'm saying? And so I arrived down there and they're studying me. Now, what's happening in the plane? so they got an old ad sky raider which was a propeller plane and they got a chair just like the ones you're sitting on they bolted it in and then they had all these machines hooked up to the plane and the wires in my head and all that take off and go is it happening i said no it's not happening it's like the dark ages of alcohol treatment so they tried everything they could try to figure out what was causing this I mean it's a joke now we're all laughing and so you know here's the all they had to go on was the guy is very disoriented. He doesn't know where he is. He has very high blood pressure, clammy sweat over him all the time, shaking, shaking and he reeks of alcohol all the time. So they left it up to the psychiatrist, true story, and I went in one day they had a formal hearing and they took away my flight status and I was diagnosed as having a childhood fear of flying that showed up after 12 years of flying so now I'm crushed because that's who I was but I have nothing left to fight this I can't do anything you know cuz I'd have no guts left I'm just I was trying to survive. But I was a regular officer, meaning I had a career and I'm entitled to continue and get 20 years and retire, et cetera. So they had to give me a new specialty. Took about three months and I get my orders to become an air traffic controller. and i make it through the school i can't believe i got through the school so you can see if you have a pilot who's drunk all the time and can't find his way anywhere the best place to put him is put him in charge of other airplanes when they can't see the runway due to bad weather so you could see we had a comedy of errors my last year drinking i I was in Iwakuni, Japan, in charge of an aircraft control unit. And the senior enlisted man saw me when I checked in. This one gunnery sergeant, he just saw me. He spotted me like that. Captain, welcome. You know, the tent area. We had our tents out there. He said, here's your little tent and a little canvas chair and all that and coffee right here. Sir, we don't want you personally controlling any airplanes, okay? you just try to make it to work and we'll do all the rest so that was what I was doing I was riding my bicycle to work and that was much more than I could handle and now I have no constraints on my drinking no 10 hours or anything so I'm drinking around the clock and during that year I lost 50 pounds due to malnutrition I could not eat. I was drinking vodka and juice. I was trying to get my food from juice because regular food would not stay down. I would just dry heave, dry heve. I stopped hanging around with my friends. I didn't even go to happy hour. I just was alone. It was like getting real black. And I somehow finished the tour, went back to Quantico, Virginia to go to a career school, you know what I mean, to get promoted to colonel. and that's when the end hit, and I was starting to get real disoriented, and I came into this. I lived off the base. I came in the front gate one day, saluted the Lance Corporal on duty, drove up to the school, which is about five big brick buildings, and they were gone. Wow, what happened to junior school? You know, gone. So I drove back down to the main gate to report it. And the corporal just had saluted me, and here I am. Well, look, and I pull up again. He says, Captain? And I said, Corporal? I was just up at junior school. It's gone. He said, What? I said the whole school is gone. Whoa! So he goes and gets the green car with the red light. Follow me, Captain. drive up it was back so he comes over he's looking at me and I said it's back so I was starting to hallucinate and you know it's funny now but it was like weird and I was in the class and I stood up my buddies told me it looked like who were getting ready to ask a question and I had a ground-mouse seizure and I bit my tongue and down. So now I'm in the hospital and they're going, God, this guy is in the school. He just bit his tongue. Whoa, I wonder what happened. I mean, we're still trying to figure out what could have caused the convulsion. It's amazing, you know, that would never happen now. So I'm there about five days while they're studying me and then I went into DTs and these were scary. I was never so frightened in my life because this is very real even though it's not happening and the CIA was, I flunked a couple memory tests on the way in and the C.I.A. was coming in with more memory tests and if I flunky them I was going to be locked up forever. This is not happening but in my mind it's happening And they're cheating. They're moving walls. And so when I go around, what used to be there is gone. And I know they're doing it and I'm writing this all down. And one more time I went out to memorize something and I opened the door and I was on the flight line and planes are taxiing by and that was it. And I screamed and started running and they captured me and put me in a straitjacket and locked me up in the nut board for six months. So that was my boom. And in that nut ward, mental institution, AA talked the psychiatrist into allowing them to bring an AA meeting. It was the first thing to do with alcohol. And so that's how I got to AA. A corpsman came in the nut ward. All drunks fall in. Down the elevator, little blue bathrobe and I listened to the talk. and I thought it was great, but I didn't connect me as being an alcoholic. Isn't that amazing? And so I went to a couple meetings, but then after five months I was an outpatient where I could go to my home at night and on weekends, and I was in the mental institution waiting orders, and so I started drinking again, even though they told me if I had another drink I'd lose my whole career. and I knew they were going to catch me. I just knew it. So on December 7, 1964, I dialed the intergroup and there was one other Marine at the Quantico base, another captain who was in AA. And they had a little group on the base, right off the base. They had about four members and he came to my house, came in the door and I haven't had a drink since he just took over took me to a meeting I got to that meeting in Manassas Virginia I've been sober about five hours and it was a group anniversary and they had ham and turkey and they people celebrating anniversaries and they had a square dance afterwards and the meeting lasted five hours and I was now sober 10 hours. I'm not happy. I mean, this is not happy to me. And I was trying to run away. It was a cold winter night, and it was all misty rain, and this damn Oddfellows Hall was all by itself somewhere, and I'm looking to see which direction to run. I don't know why. I just wanted to get out of there. I was panicking. And I felt this hand on my shoulder, and it was an Al-Anon lady who saw the way I was fidgeting or whatever and she just put her hand on my shoulder and I turned around. Her name was Betsy Lynch and I got to know them as a couple later on and she said, It's going to be all right and for some unknown reason I totally believed her. It was like some angel just put their hand there and said, It's gonna be allright and come on back in. okay and I just went back in and I had faith that I was in the right place and it was very difficult everybody's first few years are difficult my sponsor got promoted to major I didn't I was forced out of the Marine Corps without my career with six kids I was very upset I thought it was unfair here's this new God that I love I went to a meeting every night I made coffee I did everything you're supposed to. And I'm thrown out of the Marine Corps after two years ago in a meeting. So I didn't think that was fair. I'm complaining. I's not praying to God, I'm COMPLAINING to God. God, I want to thank you again for throwing us out of the Marine Corp. My kids are starving. I did go to a meeting every night. I have done everything that was asked. Thank you, God, I really appreciate that. I mean, I was resentful. That was not fair. I've since learned that fairness is a one-way street. It only goes out from me. It's not supposed to come towards me. But back then I was keeping track of whether it's fair towards me, and three months after I was out, my unit, that if I had been promoted, I would have been with them, they were all killed in the plane crash. on their way out to Denver. And I knew when I read about that crash in the paper, I knew that God knew. I had just read it. So I felt a little awkward. And I think I said something like, well, if you just told me that was going to happen, I wouldn't have been complaining so much. And so we never know. You know what I'm saying? We don't know. it could be a blessing when you when we move from the material world in the spiritual world everything gets reversed and we'll talk more about that tomorrow night I get a chance to talk about the steps what I can tell you is that I agree with Polly the single greatest thing that happened to me is to have a a relationship with a higher power. And, you know, I was trying to compare AA with religions and all of those things. And there's a story about a tribe that spent their entire time in caves. And the only thing they had were fires. And they had underground rivers and they could get fish out of there. And then they had some other stuff that grew inside there that they could eat. And they survived for generations and generations just living in the caves. And the sociologists and people who were studying things happened upon these people, and they go, my God, we've got to tell them about the world out here, but we better do it in degrees, you know, because this is a sensitive situation. And so they decided to very gingerly explain everything, you know what I mean? So that it isn't a rude shock. And one of the things they felt was essential to explain ahead of time was electricity. This invisible power that runs practically the whole world. If you're going to come out and see this world, you're gonna have to understand electricity. And so they said, well look we have two different ways to approach this. So the first guy, they gave him the book learning on electricity for a year and a half. And they started with the positive and the negative and electromagnets and just worked through textbooks at electricity at this and that. And at the end of a year and a half, he could actually pass a college test on electricity. He knew that much about electricity. And that was what they did with the first guy. Now the second guy, they had him in a little cave by himself, and they set up a generator outside, and they ran a long cord in, and he brought an electric lamp there. And he sat there, and And they got a little fire going, and he watches. They bring a cord in, bring this thing. He doesn't know it's an electric lamp. And they hook the cord up to the lamp. They take a light bulb, and they screw it in, and boom. I mean, boy, the whole cave lit up like he'd never see him. It was just unbelievable. And then they unscrewed the bulb. Boop, it got dark again. And then они взяли его指, и они вставили его в socket. and he went and the question is which guy knew more about electricity AA teaches us about God by sticking our finger in the light socket and we see the light in the people that have already achieved contact and so we are on the practical side of knowing God. It's not a question of knowing about God. It's about knowing God like your finger in the light socket. And I think that happens right in the promises. I'll talk about this tomorrow night, but I really think that that is when we do the work through the nine steps and we finish that and they start down the list of promises, which how we ever yell back are these extravagant promises we should yell back they're more than extravagance no we think not we think they're not extravagable god you ever look at them fear of people economic insecurity will leave us oh that's not extravagant that happens all the time self-seeking will slip away go on yeah well that's the end of that problem but not extravagant and then comes the sentence and this to me is a spiritual awakening we will suddenly realize that god is doing for us what we couldn't do for ourselves that is the personal awakening that does not happen as a group you know it's a we program up to a point and then it's an individual it happens to us as an individual a whole table doesn't have a spiritual awakening it happens each of us at a different time in a different way but there's an awareness and you know they talk about the two types of spiritual awakenings the one that happens boom and then the garden variety but even the garden variety happens suddenly it's just two years later and you go bingo in other words this happens it's a coincidence this happens it's coincident now I'm not nervous at my family reunion now this now my kids like me and then it goes bingo the light comes on God is doing for me and you realize hey, it's God. That is a very personal experience and it's almost the point of being alive is to have that experience. I really believe that that is what our destiny is. And anytime we're helping somebody achieve that experience, you can't do a bigger favor for anyone than to help them in the direction of having a profound personal transformation so that they see the world in a different way disease of perception spirituality enables us it's not um when things are wrong and then we want them to get straightened out that isn't what happens we're given the power to see they already are alright. There's a big difference. They already are alright. You just can't see it yet. And I couldn't see AA when I first got here. I couldn't say that this was the best thing that ever happened in my life. If you had asked me my first month, I would have said, Hey Sandy, how you doing? I'm in AA. Oh God. How low can you get? It was bad enough when I was in the nut ward No, I'm in AA. I thought it was the worst thing in the world. Guess what's the best thing that ever happened to me? AA. Now, what's that? I'm seeing it differently. I've been given the power to see how wonderful you are, how wonderful the world is, how much sense the world makes, and that is the gift that no one should go without. Thank you all very much. Well, I thank Sandy for that. That was truly, truly wonderful. Would you please show your appreciation for both the speakers today? Paul and Sandy. I've just a short announcement to make I was speaking earlier it's an age thing you know it's about a meeting tonight at 10.30 it's the Friday into Saturday group and it meets in the St Mary's Cathedral on the Great Western Road starts at 10 30 So if any of you are still on the high after this, you're welcome to go along and you can see Carol about that. So before I close the meeting, I think we just take a moment just to reflect on what we've heard tonight. If you'd help me close the meeting now with a serenity prayer. God, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot, courage to change the things that I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Amen.